The Tories need to be bold - they've got nothing to lose

By Janet Daley

12:00AM GMT 23 Jan 2001

DO you need a big idea to win an election? We used to think so. But maybe things are different now. People are relatively rich and they tell the pollsters that they are pretty satisfied with the way their lives are going. They are also (and perhaps this is not unconnected) notoriously apolitical.

So even if there were some humongous ideological principles floating around, voters might not be interested. They might even be alarmed or repelled. "Who needs all this cosmic theorising?", they might think: we just get on with the day-to-day business of running things and expect our politicians to do the same.

Maybe that is the thinking behind the Conservative approach to the election campaign. There must be some explanation for their timorous, two-steps-forward, one-step-back modus operandi. Tax cuts? Um, yes, but only little ones that will scarcely make a dent in the Treasury's wealth confiscation. We wouldn't want to put at risk any government project that anybody might think was important. Oooh, no.

Cut back public spending? Well, a bit: some shavings and parings here and there but, don't worry, nothing drastic at all. Health and education budgets? Absolutely sacred - even though it is obvious that governments don't have the right expertise to run these services to modern expectations.

Well then, what about all those trade and industry programmes for intervening in (and distorting) the market mechanisms that keep business efficient? Surely, they could go straight in the bin, thus saving a not inconsiderable amount of taxpayers' money and reducing the capacity of the Whitehall machine to mess around with things it knows nothing about? Sorry, no. Don't think we have any major plans for dismantling government meddling with industry: at least, none that we'll talk about.

And then there is transport. The Labour Government has presided over the most disastrous meltdown of the rail services in living memory and it has succeeded in presenting this as a failure of Tory privatisation.

The Tory front bench, apparently as ready as the most know-nothing voter to believe Blairite propaganda, seems to accept the blame by withdrawing from the arena. And yet, what is it that Labour is proposing as its own transport solution? Why more privatisation, of course: this time of the London Underground.

So, absurdly, while Labour seems to be saying that the Conservative approach was not only right but that it is still the only realistic solution available, the Tories themselves are afraid to defend it with any real conviction.

Now, I could understand all this pusillanimous pussying around if the Tories were ahead in the polls (as they might expect to be at this point in a parliament) or even if the parties were neck and neck. If the country seemed to be finding some sort of natural even keel after the hurricane winds of 1997, the smart advice would be: steady on, don't frighten the horses, just keep talking like sound professional managers and your supporters will come home. But, God knows, things are not quite like that.

If ever there was a moment for saying, "what the hell, let's go for it", this must be it. Especially as it is not really true that people are so content with the state of everything that they are practically asleep on their feet. They may feel that their own lives and prospects are fairly satisfactory but I suspect that - if asked - they would attribute that largely to their own efforts. And it is just because they themselves are making such an effort, and working so very hard, that they are well and truly disgusted with the services that they see government as being responsible for providing (or at least supervising).

Commuters are spitting teeth about the trains. Patients (and their families) are appalled by the state of the hospitals. Parents are desperately despairing about the schools. Most people - especially the poorer and more vulnerable whom Labour loves to claim as its special concern - are terrified by the collapse of policing. Ironically, under Labour there is an even greater disparity between the publicly provided and the privately available services than there was under the Conservatives.

Because there is more private wealth in society - a movement which Gordon Brown professes to admire, although he seems to see it primarily as a milch cow for the Treasury - there has been a spectacular growth in the market for what private money can buy. Financial services, a huge diversity of pensions and insurance products, private health cover, educational tutoring and independent sixth form colleges have all exploded as people have become affluent enough - and sufficiently disgusted with the official state service - to choose their own options.

Labour politicians must be aware of this. Most of them are the sort of people who would be buying these products themselves if it were not politically embarrassing, and whose friends certainly do so. So what do they do? This is a real dilemma for them. That is why they penalise the consumers of these private alternatives by, say, removing the tax break on private health insurance for the elderly, or raiding private pension funds with a nasty tweak of the tax system, while insisting that they want to tear down the ideological wall between public and private provision. What that appears to mean is that the NHS will be allowed to hire services from the private hospitals when it sees fit - not that you, as a patient, will be able to move flexibly between the two sectors, as you see fit.

But the Tories need have no such ambivalence. They can say that we should not have a two tier system of private choice and public mediocrity: that the freedom to choose and make use of any service that is competently run should be available to everyone. And then they can fill out the policies - like "free schools", and government regulating rather than owning hospitals - that they now only hint at, which would make such things possible. After all, what have they got to lose?